Millennials are the future for Airbnb China

After a few years of taking baby steps in China, Airbnb has now taken a foothold with a dedicated brand for the market, adding Shanghai experiences and promising to double its investment and triple its workforce.

The new brand "Aibiying" translates to "welcome each other with love" and will be supported by a marketing campaign rolled out over the next few months.

CEO Brian Chesky said in a statement that "Millennials...who are seeking an alternative way to travel" were specifically on Airbnb's radar.

More than 80% of Airbnb's users in China are under the age of 35, the highest proportion of Millennials any market it operates in.

The release also dripfeeds some other data about Airbnb's Chinese presence:

"To date, there have been more than 5.3 million guest arrivals by Chinese travellers at Airbnb listings all over the world. Outbound travel from China grew 142% in 2016 alone."

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Airbnb is relatively circumspect about its numbers, and with some much speculation about its operational and financial performance anything official is worth looking into. At the start of November Airbnb officially announced that it was setting up a dedicated Airbnb China business unit and that release said:

"To date, there have been more than 3.5 million guest arrivals by Chinese travellers at Airbnb listings all over the world."

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So that means that 1.8 million Chinese people have stayed at an Airbnb outside China in the past five months or so.

Comparing the inbound and domestic numbers between the two releases also shows how much Airbnb has grown in the past five months - in November it said that "there have been nearly 1 million guest arrivals at Airbnb listings in China to date" whereas the latest stat is "nearly 1.6 million guest arrivals at listings within China."

Setting up a dedicated Airbnb China unit allowed it to start localising its services for China - so it now accepts Alipay, allows people to sign in via WeChat and runs a 24/7 customer service line in Mandarin. Next on its to do list is "rethink the core booking experience to go even further in meeting the needs of Chinese users."

Last week rumours emerged that the Chinese government had taken part in Airbnb's latest funding round via one of its investment funds. While this has never been confirmed, Airbnb does have relationships in place with authorities in Shenzhen, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. And in 2015 Chinese VC firms China Broadband Capital and Sequoia China took a stake in the business.

With the foundations in place, Airbnb is now ready to take on the Chinese market. The dedicated brand will help, but the concern must be how the incumbents in the market will respond. Ctrip is not known for its accommodation of competitors (no pun intended) and, in terms of outbound at least, Ctrip has access to air inventory which can take its Chinese customers to its overseas homeshare inventory.

An Airbnb strategic partnership with a rival OTA in China, or with an airline group, or airline distribution platform, would make things even more interesting.